In LUCY IN THE SKY, Natalie Portman plays Lucy Cola, a strong woman whose determination and drive as an astronaut take her to space, where she’s deeply moved by the transcendent experience of seeing her life from afar. Back home as Lucy’s world suddenly feels too small, her connection with reality slowly unravels.
With Noah Hawley’s drama Lucy in the Sky now playing in movie theaters., we sat down with star Natalie Portman and listened to thoughts about the making of the film, written by Hawley, Brian C Brown, and Elliott DiGuiseppi. The film also stars Dan Stevens, Zazie Beetz, Pearl Amanda Dickson, and Ellen Burstyn.
Q: What was the key for understanding Lucy whom you played?
Natalie Portman: Well, I think it was really about this existential crisis that Noah (Noah Hawley, Director) and I talked about a lot. What happens when you have this experience that makes you feel more alive than ever and have more meaning than ever but part of that experience is really realizing how small we are and how meaningless, perhaps, everything we care about is in the universe. And this relationship that she has with Jon’s (Jon Hamm, played Mark) character is very much about that, where he’s kind of positing this like, “Nothing really matters let’s just do whatever the hell we want.” Which is so tempting to go into. And she’s kind of fighting for meaning. She’s kind of fighting for, “It does matter, I do care, I am feeling something big. Even though all sides point to nothing matters, I want something to matter very badly.” And it’s kind of the most human thing that we can all relate to, even if none of us can actually claim to have been in space.
Q: How did you work with Noah to pitch Lucy’s emotional level for each scene?
NP: Yeah, that was definitely tricky because it is so specific and Noah really built it in a way where the pressure just keeps mounting and mounting and mounting until the kind of like tightly wound spring just explodes. And yeah, so it was when the grandmother is sick, when she passes, when she splits with her husband, when she finds out about the cheating, when she has her problems at work, it’s like it’s really just small little increments that just.. yeah, it was a conversation throughout.
Q: Do you think there is a difference in sensibility when make actors go to space that is different to women actors? Like Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt went up…
NP: Well one thing I really appreciated about this film was that I feel like a lot of times when it’s a female astronaut they give her a child back on earth and it’s like, that’s the drama only job the woman would possibly have would be thinking about her child while she’s away. So to have a woman who her main emotional drama is having an existential crisis I thought was kind of radical and was very meaningful to me. Not to criticize, I love those movies, I’m not trying to be critical, I just thought it was a very unusual..
Q: Did you research about mental illness for the film since the character you play in Black Swan also went through mental issues?
NP: That’s a really great point and it’s absolutely a piece of it but I think what’s so accurate about Noah’s guiding me through it is that it’s not one thing and that I think is true for most human behavior, like it’s not a simple, “Oh there’s a child with trauma, let’s draw a line to this behavior as an adult.” It’s like there are many things. There’s how her family was when she grew up and sleep deprivation and the return from space and seeing things differently. It’s this issue at work with feeling gender-based discrimination and unfairness, it’s a man who is treating her badly, it’s her grandmother who has been her support dying, there are so many, like every person is a unique constellation of issues, to put it in space talk [laughs] but we are each unique points of specificities and our behavior is a result of all of those complicated things. It’s not one input. So yes, that’s absolutely an element but there is no central element there, it’s just a collection.
Q: What was your most memorable moment of filming this?
NP: The bees were really… that was really one of the most magical experiences of my life. Afterwards, I was just like, “Thank you Noah. Thank you so much for this experience.” Because that was so so cool to just be in the middle of it and holding them so close. That was really amazing. And Dan (Dan Stevens, played Lucy’s husband) also brought his telescope every time we shot night shoots and so like between takes we could go look at sometimes the international space station would pass right over and you could see it. Those are magical moments.
Q: Would you consider this role part of the new feminist wave in Hollywood?
NP: I think that every movie that is about a woman as a complex human being, with her own very specific intentions, flaws, strengths, just showing kind of a complete humanity is feminist. So yes, I think there have been more different kind of representations of women, the more complicated and more they are agents of their own narrative. That’s part of allowing women to be all different kinds of things, not allowing, but showing women how they are, which is a vast, infinite, array of positivity.
Q: Did you talk to astronauts?
NP: Yeah I was lucky enough to visit NASA and talk to some astronauts there during my tour who had been on the space station and they were describing how physically it was so hard to come back. They called it like burning the rubber on their sneakers because it’s hard to feel your feet after being in no gravity, it was like sledging your feet. And then of course there is a whole protocol for psychological well-being because it is really shocking to be there and back – for everybody. And there’s also like quite a lot of vetting that they do of potential astronauts for their social and emotional wellbeing because even being up there is really hard to deal with this small group of people in a confined space for extended periods of time in very sometimes stressful conditions. But you have to be pretty stable to even get the opportunity to go, which makes it even more remarkable that someone could such an extreme unravelling.
Q: The character reminds me Black Swan because of Lucy is also in the competition world.
NP: Well unlike the ballet world, the astronaut space world is more of a situation where women are one out of ten players, which in a lot of positions of power women get, a slot, you know, a seat at the table. And when you’re one of a kind, you can be ‘otherized,’ you can be “the woman”, “Oh you know the one, the woman in the room. Right?” But if there’s more than one you have to pay attention to someone’s personality. You have to say, “Oh you know the one who is more into this specific kind of planetary…’ You know, disposition or whatever.” You have to actually pay attention to some characteristics about the person, their humanity, to describe them if you’re talking about them. You can’t just be like, “Oh the girl”. And I think that there’s a very specific thing about being “the one” in the workplace that is a very different situation. There’s also the other thing that is interesting about women’s work is that it tends to usually either be one or like a women’s field, like ballet, nursing, teaching like… that’s why the equal pay conversation is super complicated because there’s whole occupations that are only women, or the majority women, and those tend to be lower paid occupations. It’s not equal pay….Anyway, it’s a long conversation [laughs]. I could go on.
Lucy in The Sky, in theaters now.
With additional reporting by I. Hasegawa/HNW